Charles Darwin at the age of 31, portrait by George Richmond.
Understanding Our Ancestors, Understanding Our Emotions
Charles Darwin at the age of 31, portrait by George Richmond.
Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution based on three principles: “Superabundance” (production of more offspring than necessary for mere replacement), “Variation,” and “Natural Selection.” He also founded the psychology of emotions. Paul Ekman continued Darwin’s investigation of emotional expressions and proposed that some emotions, which include happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, have distinct expressions and are human universals that derive from evolution. Although this proposal has become controversial, emotions are now central to psychology. They occur usually when an event in the world affects an inner concern. They involve the mind, physiological changes, and actions.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was the founder of modern biology, and one of the founders of modern psychology. On the Origin of Species, in which Darwin presented his theory that human beings have evolved from other animals, has influenced psychology profoundly and has pervaded the way we think about ourselves.
At the age of sixteen, Charles was sent as a medical student to Edinburgh University but often, instead of going to classes, he would go out to study invertebrate creatures along the shores of the Firth of Forth.1 In despair at the failure of his son’s medical studies, Charles’s father sent him to Cambridge where he obtained a BA in theology. He seemed destined for life as a country parson, with a hobby of collecting beetles. At Cambridge, however, he attracted the attention of scientists for his work in natural history. Perhaps most important, he became close to Adam Sedgwick, a clergyman who was professor of geology, and to John Henslow, also a clergyman, and professor of botany. It was Henslow who recommended Darwin be appointed naturalist on the British navy ship HMS Beagle, which set out on a voyage that would take nearly five years, to chart coastlines in South America. The Beagle returned to England in 1836, and a year later Darwin published his first book, The Voyage of the Beagle, presenting scientific observations he had made during the voyage, on geology, on living species of animals and plants, and on fossils. In 1839 he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and at the opening of this chapter you can see a portrait of him that was painted shortly after this. The relationship was a long and companionable one. It resulted in a happy family with many children.
During his voyage aboard the Beagle, Darwin was looking to see whether the earth had changed during geological time, and whether—if it had—species were not fixed but had to change to fit the new environments that came into being. He found that new environments had indeed been formed. Coral reefs, for instance, were created by microorganisms after the Earth’s creation, and new species had come into existence to fit these new niches.
Darwin’s notebooks show that after his return from the voyage on the Beagle, he was working avidly through his observations.2 One set of notes, which he called “Transmutation,” would lead him to his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s theory had three components. The first he called “Superabundance.” Members of each species produce more offspring than are needed merely to replace themselves. The second he called “Variation.” Members of each species produce offspring that differ from each other, with variations of anatomy and ways of behaving being passed on to the next generation by heredity. The third and most famous principle was “Selection.” Offspring that had variations that fitted them most closely to their environment were selected. They survived and reproduced, to pass on some of their variations to their progeny. Those with different variations, which were less adapted to their environment, did not survive.
In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett wrote that this is the best single idea that anyone has ever had. In psychology Darwin’s theory affects how we think. Much of our psychology derives from our animal inheritance. It isn’t just that we share with our nearest animal relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, anatomical features such as eyes, ears, and fingers. Psychological features such as the way in which we protect our infant offspring from harm also derive from our animal heritage.
Darwin had conceived his theory of evolution by natural selection by 1838, but although he wrote private essays on it in 1842 and 1844, he didn’t think himself sufficiently qualified as a biologist to publish it. Partly to improve himself in this regard, he spent eight years studying barnacles. He did not publish On the Origin of Species until 1859, more than twenty years after he conceived his theory.
A year later, when she heard of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the wife of the bishop of Worcester is said to have remarked, “My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it does not become generally known.”3 It did become known. We humans were not created specially and distinctly. We are descended from apelike ancestors.
Darwin and his wife Emma were devoted parents. They were devastated when their eldest daughter, Annie, died at the age of ten. Darwin’s theory of evolution had not challenged his Christian faith, but this event did so.
Darwin was not just modest. He was anxious in public. His father had left him enough money to live on; even so, he worked almost every day … at home. Family life, in Downe Village, in Kent, was affectionate. The Darwins’ son Francis remembers the tenderness his father showed his mother.4 Although he didn’t like going out, from time to time Darwin would stay at health spas to try and cure his many health problems that included anxiety and gastric symptoms, which he worried that he would pass by heredity to his children.
Darwin on Expression of Emotions
At the same time that Darwin was writing notes on “Transmutation” with equal fervor, he was writing a second set of notes that he called “Mind and Materialism.” These would form the basis of his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the first substantial scientific study of emotions. It was based on observations of both animals and people. When he lived in London, he made many visits to the newly established London Zoo, at that time open only to scientists for purposes of research.
Figure 6. Photograph of a young woman smiling, from Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions. Source: Chapter VIII of Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals (second edition, of 1889). London: Murray; image from book, photo taken by Keith Oatley.
Darwin’s book on emotions was one of the earliest to use photography for scientific purposes. He had photographs taken of people expressing emotions naturally, such as you see in figure 6, and also of actors expressing emotions on request. Darwin was also one of the first to use the psychological method of questionnaires. He had a set of questions printed and sent to missionaries, government officials, scientists, and others in different parts of the world, in which he asked for observations of facial expressions in different societies, especially among people who had not associated much with Europeans. In the journal Mind, in 1877, he also made one of the first contributions to developmental psychology, with detailed observations of the emotional and cognitive development he had made of his son William, as an infant.
Darwin’s book on expression was a kind of sequel to On the Origin of Species. He argued that if we are descended from animals that were not yet human, the study of emotional expressions could contribute to the evolutionary idea. He said that “some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except under the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition.”5
Although we are descended from them, human beings are distinctively different from other animals. So, despite biologically almost inconsequential differences such as skin color or facial shape, we humans are very similar to each other psychologically. Some characteristics that are distinctively human are those we hold most dear. The ability to use language to communicate, the extended love of parents for their children and of people for their sexual partners, the capacity to cooperate with others in tasks that we cannot do alone, the ability to create and improve technologies and to make art, the ability to create societies and cultures. All these have been bequeathed to us by evolution. None of them is characteristic of species other than ours.
In modern times, among the best-known writers on evolution has been Richard Dawkins. In The Selfish Gene, he argues that every gene is selfish because its purpose is to make copies of itself. In this respect, all plants and animals, including ourselves, are merely the vehicles of genes. It makes sense for parents and offspring, and other close relations, to help each other (unselfishly) because they pass on copies of the same genes. In his book, Dawkins also introduces the idea of the meme, a cultural version of a gene, which transmits itself by being part of a belief system.
Faculties shared by humans, but not other animals, are human universals.6 The implication is that these have evolved since the time 6–10 million years ago when progenitors of both chimpanzees and humans lived in African forests. Some such universals would have been firmly established by the time modern humans emerged, some 300,000 years ago: distinctive human characteristics that are passed on, programmed by our genes into our brains.7
From his own observations, and from the results of the questionnaires he sent to observers in different parts of the world, Darwin concluded that “the same state of mind [a specific emotion] is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity.”8 The idea is an important one. Could it perhaps be responsible for us being able to communicate as well as we do with others across boundaries of nationality?
The researcher best known for taking up Darwin’s idea of universal emotions has been Paul Ekman. The study by which he became influential was conducted with Richard Sorenson and Wallace Friesen. From more than 3,000 photographs, they selected thirty white male and female faces, which expressed what they thought were six pure basic emotions: happiness, fear, disgust-contempt, anger, surprise, and sadness. They showed these photographs to people from the literate societies of the United States, Brazil, and Japan, and from two preliterate societies in New Guinea and Borneo. For each photo, participants were asked to choose one from a list of six names (for the six basic emotions). For the preliterate samples, the names of the emotions were spoken in the observers’ native language, or another language with which they were familiar. For the literate participants, responses were between 97 percent and 63 percent as predicted across all six emotions, with people performing best with smiles, which they said indicated happiness. Among the preliterate participants, again smiles were the easiest: between 99 percent and 82 percent of these observers also labeled smiles as expressions of happiness. Preliterate participants were, however, less good than literate ones at labeling the other emotions as the researchers expected, although their scores were above chance levels.
From results of this kind, Ekman has argued for six basic emotions, each signaled by a facial expression that is universal.9 Whereas some researchers have accepted this hypothesis, others have been skeptical. They have pointed out, for instance, that cross-cultural recognition of some expressions is not very good, and that alternative hypotheses about recognition of expressions across different cultures are plausible.
Ekman developed a theory proposed by his mentor, Sylvan Tomkins. It is that a human emotion is based on a program that is wired into the brain, and derived from evolution in a way that, among other things, produces distinct facial expressions. Ekman says emotions are “unbidden,” meaning you cannot will them to occur; they are triggered automatically by events.10 Each one, he asserts, includes a distinctive physiological change plus a distinctive pattern of muscular movements of the face in a recognizable display.
Physiology and expression were starting points for the famous theory of emotion proposed by William James. In 1884 he argued that the emotions that we feel are literally what we feel: our inner sense of physiological changes, along with inner perceptions of the bodily changes that Darwin called expressions. An emotion is the feeling of the tension, of tears, of running from a danger. If we subtract the sensation of such changes, said James, no emotion remains. The physiological changes that Ekman measured during emotions can be seen as contributing to James’s theory.
Ekman developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) for recognizing emotions from live facial expressions, from still photographs, or from movies, based on the muscles involved in making the expressions.11 Someone who has trained in this coding system is able to recognize what emotions a person is expressing. A smile, expressing happiness, for instance, involves contraction of muscles at the side of the mouth, and also muscles that crinkle the sides of the eyes. If a smile includes a curved mouth but lacks contractions of muscles around the sides of the eyes, which are not under voluntary control, the smile is likely to have been put on, not spontaneous. There are now computer systems that recognize expressions from photographs and video recordings, and do as well as people trained in expression coding.12 This will benefit research and will enable people’s faces to be monitored by tiny cameras as they engage in various activities.
Ekman used to practice emotion recognition by watching television shows in which politicians, pundits, and media personalities spoke on camera. He would turn the sound to mute, so as not to hear what they said and could concentrate on the facial expressions, which he thought were more truthful. If you do the same you will recognize happy expressions of friendliness. Anger is more difficult: look for eyebrows pulled down and together, staring eyes, lips either closed and tightened or showing a square mouth. Ekman used his knowledge to detect lying; he trained members of police forces and Homeland Security to observe its signs.13 Ekman reached a pinnacle that few psychologists imagine: a television series, Lie to Me, was based on his work on emotion recognition and the detection of lies.14
What Emotions Really Are
Both Darwin and Ekman concentrated less on emotions as such and more on their expressions. But what are emotions, really, in our day-to-day life and in our inmost being? The best approach, which is widely accepted, is that of Nico Frijda.15 He proposed that an emotion is a state of readiness to act in a certain way when some event is appraised as affecting a concern that we have. A particular kind of readiness may be to approach, or to acquire new information, or to avoid something. This readiness often involves physiological changes and expressions, but it’s primarily mental and has to do with intentions. What an emotion does, proposes Frijda, is to give priority—an urge—to one kind of action rather than another, for instance to touch a friend on the arm with a feeling of affection, or to walk sullenly out of the room when we feel insulted.
Darwin wrote his book on emotions to offer contemporary evidence for his theory of evolution. He proposed that, as with hair bristling with terror, and tears of sadness, some expressions of emotions are residues of our evolution from animal states and from development in childhood. Had Darwin thought his theory was better established, he might have thought that emotions themselves had evolved generally to be functional in the kind of way that Frijda has explained.
Controversy has emerged recently with the proposal that emotions thought to be basic and discrete by Ekman and colleagues are not universal. Lisa Barrett, Batja Mesquita, and Maria Gendron say this paradigm should be replaced; also see Barrett’s 2017 book, How Emotions Are Made. The alternative is that emotions are based on a simple system called core affect, founded on just two categories: positive-versus-negative feeling and the degree of energization or enervation It is proposed that a core affect can then prompt a range of culturally constructed and idiosyncratic ways in which we think about and talk about our emotions. Philip Kragel and Kevin LaBar have used pattern analyses of brain imaging results to see how far this idea of emotions as based on valence and arousal can explain brain activations of emotion. They conclude that the way in which emotions are represented in the brain does not fit well with the idea of two dimensions of valence and arousal, but is better understood in terms of brain regions that underlie discrete universal emotions.
One way to think of this is that the discrete states are evolutionarily derived bundles of types of action readiness.16 In this way, happiness has evolved to prompt states of readiness to continue what one is doing, making modifications as necessary. Fear is the set of states of readiness that include stopping what one is doing, scanning the environment for signs of danger, and preparing to escape.
Sociality
A great deal of psychology focuses on the individual, but for emotions this is not ideal. Although we experience emotions personally, most of them are interpersonal.
Our sociality may be seen from emotion diaries, in which people are asked to keep a record of the emotions they experience in the course of their day-to-day lives, jotting down their name for each emotion, what it was about, who was there, and so on.17 In a report of employed people who kept diaries of the next four emotions they experienced after being given a diary of this kind, it was found that 69 percent of the emotions were predictable from the kind of goal or concern that was affected. Most emotions were not individual, but interpersonal: 59 percent of episodes were caused by the action of another person, and for anger this proportion was 75 percent. In forty-nine episodes of the emotion of happiness, twenty of the incidents involved an urge to touch, hug, or caress. If you want to see this kind of emotion in action, visit the arrivals area at an airport. In those waiting and arriving—in people of all nationalities across a range of ages—you see emotions of happiness, warmth, and affection, expressed in waves and smiles and hugs.
Actors in the theater are given a script—the words of a play—and on the stage they enact emotion-based relationships with other characters. Everyday emotions are the other way around. An emotion occurs: love, or anger, or whatever it may be: a wordless script, and the person finds words appropriate for it.18 With the emotion, the words that flow from the emotion-script enable the relationship to go forward.
Putting this another way, most emotions involve other people, and often emotions themselves are shared, in empathy and other ways.19 So happiness is the emotion of cooperation; it can involve joint plans and shared concerns. It is not an accident that many advertisements include people smiling at you. Sadness is an emotion of disengagement but also a request to others to help. Anger is the emotion of something having gone wrong in a relationship so that it needs re-negotiation with the other person, who is likely also to feel angry. Expressing the anger can help you to sort out what’s gone wrong. But anger is also the emotion of conflict, and can sometimes lead to disengagement from the other person. Fear, or anxiety, invites others to join with you in collective avoidance of danger. Contempt is the emotion toward another person, or group, that denies humanity in the relationship.
When we experience a strong emotion, we tend to talk to someone else about it. Bernard Rimé and colleagues asked people to think back to an experience of an emotion suggested by one of seventeen emotion-names, and asked if they confided it to anyone. As you can see from figure 7, for love and joy, about half the people talked to someone about it on the same day, and the other half later. For anger and fear, nearly all the confiding was done on the day the emotion happened. For sadness, people continued to confide beyond a week. In a theoretical and empirical review, Rimé reports on people who kept a diary of the event that had affected them most during the day. The majority of these incidents were confided on that same day, often to more than one person.
Confiding enables people to integrate their emotions into how they think and feel about themselves in relation to each other: What kind of person am I to have experienced this emotion in this way? What do you think of me for having experienced this emotion in this way?
Despite what Darwin said about some of our emotional expressions occurring, whether or not they are useful, emotions themselves are as useful as the psychological functions of perception or thinking. They are at the very center of mind and human meanings. Their function is to signal to us that an event is happening that affects one of our concerns: something potentially important. They displace other matters from our minds. They make the issue urgent. They make us ready for certain kinds of action.
Figure 7. Percentages of occasions on which people spoke to someone else about emotions they had experienced, as found by Bernard Rimé and colleagues. The top bar for each emotion is confiding on the same day, the second bar is for later that week, and the lower bar is for later than a week. Data source: Rimé, B., Mesquita, B., Philippot, P., & Boca, S. (1991). Beyond the emotional event: Six studies on the social sharing of emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 5, 435–465. Figure drawn by Keith Oatley.
The problem with emotions is that they don’t in themselves let us know whether an event that prompted them is important or merely urgent. In the case of fear, for instance, is there really a danger or only the possibility of a danger? The emotion of fear is like a burglar alarm. Is someone really trying to break in? Or has the alarm gone off for some other reason?
We take our cues from emotions, each one usually prompted by an event that affects a concern or goal. Our mind can become filled with it. It can become an object of consciousness of what the event may mean, of what its implications are, of what our intentions might be in relation to it. It is we who must decide whether the event is not merely urgent but also important.
Erasmus was one of the most influential people of the European Renaissance. With the new availability of books, he promoted literacy and education. His own most-read book was Praise of Folly, in which Folly stands up and gives a speech in praise of herself, a very foolish thing to do. She points out that she is a woman, so already at a disadvantage, and says that although many people present themselves in public as very serious, if one looks beneath the surface one may see that some speak from pride in being superior and in the right while everyone else is wrong, while others speak from a desire to be the center of attention. Such people scarcely admit to emotions of these kinds; they prefer to think they are being rational. They do this, Folly suggests, because “It’s confessed on all sides that the emotions are the province of folly. Indeed, this is the way we distinguish the wise man from the fool, that the one is governed by his reason, the other by his emotions.”20 Folly goes on to say that, really, “emotions not only serve as guides to those who press towards the gates of wisdom, they also act as spurs and incitements to the practice of every virtue.”
It took several hundred more years for emotions to be regarded as important in psychology. Now it’s becoming evident that in human lives and relationships they are central. The idea of empathy, with which we closed the previous chapter, is being able to experience an emotion within our self that is similar to an emotion being experienced by someone else. The emotion is shared, be it happiness, anger, sadness, or anxiety. It’s one of the ways in which we can come to know others, and coordinate ourselves with them.
We are animals of a particular kind: among all the species, we humans are the most social. Among principles that emerge are ideas that emotions have been selected for during evolution, and that they are usually functional, especially in the ways that they enable us to relate to other people. In this way emotions mediate day-to-day interactions with people we know.21 Over the longer term they include antipathy toward those with whom we are in conflict, and affection for those with whom we are close.
